Suggested by NSWGR8022 on July 10, 2015, 6:31 pm Under consideration3 votes

Why stop at the images only. There is so much information on this site it would be great if the image fav idea could be extended to threads. There are threads I follow which do not get a lot of posting and sometimes i miss the email.

If you could list your favourite threads and then be able to select a thread from that listing. Hey that would be really cool!

I sometimes add a post to a forum thanking a member for their contribution, particularly if they have answered a question that I have asked. This adds a post to the thread which is probably redundant.

If I just want to say thankyou, it might be more efficient to add a thankyou option to the thread reactions (alongside like/dislike/informative/funny etc) which I can click on and negates the need for my post. Can we consider this?

For example - Inland Rail should almost have its own forum parallel to the NSW/VIC ones etc. All items related to IR go in there making it easier to find historic conversations etc, perhaps preventing new threads asking old questions.

I recommend a "forum post saved" feature that runs first at 30 seconds then runs every 15 seconds or so. This is particularly important for long, considered replies. The first save trigger time could be set to avoid saving quick replies which would just be an unwanted and unnecessary burden on your .

I think users will also just expect this feature in the next few years as it is standard in many websites and cloud editors.
(The impetus for my suggestions was that
I wrote a long post in a forum and when I clicked on post the dreaded "server connection lost" came up. I couldn't go back and I lost the whole thing. It wasn't "War and Peace" but I had given it some thought so it was pretty frustrating.)

Certain topics such as lists of things would be better organised by allowing users to edit a common page.

At the moment, Railpage does not seem to allow this. Users have to add extra material at the end of a topic, making it ever more verbose.
Topics that would benefit by a common page would include:
* List of Ministers of Railways
* List of Commissioners of Railways
* Timeline of Railway Brakes
* Timeline of Railway Couplings

Common page editing would allow such pages to be kept succinct with text added in correct order.

Since a common page might be subjected to clumsy editing or even vandalism, there would need to be an associated "Edit History" page which would record the name and date when a user last edited a common page. This Edit History page might be "trimmed" like the Test Forum.

In this case, one thread was created from a news article posted on the front page and the other by a user directly posting a link to the article on the original article in question. This clogs up the forums and disjoints actual discussion.

This duplication of threads can also occur when there is a long-running, existing thread on a topic (such as Inland Rail) and people creating new threads as further news articles on the topic occur do not bother to search for existing topics. In this case, the merger of the 'news article discussion' thread with the existing topic would provide extra context to those unfamiliar with the topic at hand.

There are several possible ways to remedy this issue:

An 'existing thread merger' flag for reports so that moderators can merge the threads if necessary. The description of the flag would ask the reporter to add a link to the existing thread.

An 'existing thread' button similar to the herring button that would open a dialogue box to ask the user to post a link to an existing topic

Enable other users to point a news article to an existing discussion thread. Currently only the original article poster can do this, but it is often ignored.

Suggested by Graham4405 on April 16, 2015, 9:05 am Will not implement1 vote

Other discussion groups have a message such as the one below at the bottom of discussion threads that have been inactive for a time. Might be a good idea here to assist in avoiding "raising the dead" inadvertantly.

"This discussion has been inactive for over a year.

You may get a better answer to your question by starting a new discussion."

In much the same fashion as the forums index, pretty much; a "Mark as Read" button on the right hand side of each unread thread so one can go through and mark certain threads he (she) has no reason to want to read, so it doesn't show new posts on the index, mostly.

In this idea instead of users posting service failures and updates or twitter links for comment we have a system which reads the twitter feed and when an update comes through it is automatically posted to the forum thread.

Some Railpage subscribers would only frequent and have an interest in certain forums. To streamline users experience, each forum could have a check box which subscribers could select to "hide" that forum and hide all posts from that forum on the New / Unread posts panel, thus reducing the pages of unread posts to only those of interest to the subscriber.

Suggested by james.au on March 23, 2016, 12:19 pm Under consideration0 votes

This is likely a bit of a vanity project, but is it possible to have somewhere on your profile page a count of all of the likes/funny/disagree etc that has been put on your posts? It would be interesting to see what those stats look like (and possibly how you compare to others)?

From what I've noticed, there seems to be an excess of subforums in the trainsim section (taking into account the frequency of posts). To reform it and remove some clutter, I have some suggestions for it

Merge the MSTS forums into a single forum. The number of posts in these forums seems to have plummeted massively over the last couple of years.

Delete the Metro MSTS forum which has seen no posts since it was created (alternatively name it into a miscellaneous/other forum).

Remove the MSTS X forum (development for this game was abandoned over 5 years ago)

Move the off topic posts in the Train Simulator/Railworks forum into a miscellaneous/other forum.

Suggested by james.au on May 23, 2015, 2:50 pm Will not implement0 votes

Probably one for the will not implement category, but I've been a reader of these forums for a whle now and there is some great discussion here. Im also a user of airliners.net (main forum link http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/) which seems to have a really efficient forum layout, is quick and easy to read, and replies are easy too. Its pretty simple and makes for a good forum experience. If youre looking to upgrade the forum at some stage in the future, this might be an idea to look at.